When Kimi K3 dropped, the Western internet quickly pivoted from the model itself to its creator. Media outlets started running down Yang Zhilin's pedigree: undergraduate at Tsinghua, PhD from Carnegie Mellon, stints at Google Brain and Meta, and then a return to China to found Moonshot AI. K3's performance on coding and agent tasks is approaching the frontier set by US models, and that's got a lot of people asking: "Why didn't the US keep him?"
One camp blames America's immigration system. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says the US is scaring away top global talent with its visa policies. Y Combinator partner Ankit Gupta was blunter: "It's idiotic that the US doesn't give every AI PhD a green card outright."
But Yang's advisor, Russ Salakhutdinov, quickly set the record straight: that explanation doesn't apply to Yang. He had plenty of opportunities to stay in the US — including a direct invitation from Apple executives. Yang chose to go back to China because, as he put it, if he didn't try, he would regret it for the rest of his life.
On the other side, some nativist accounts redirected their ire at Salakhutdinov and US universities. They claimed academia has "let down Americans" and pointed to the ethnic makeup of his students. Other academics came to Salakhutdinov's defense, arguing he was simply proud of his student's achievements and shouldn't face a nationalist pile-on.
Carnegie Mellon professor Jian Ma noted that while Yang's success is rare, US universities still have plenty of equally brilliant international students. The growing uncertainty around immigration and international exchange, he argued, will only make it harder for the US to attract that talent.